Disc Two: Special FeaturesThe Making of The Bridge on the River Kwai
documentary (13 chapters, approx. 53 mins), The Rise
and Fall of a Jungle Giant featurette (approx. 6 mins), USC
Short Film introduced by William Holden (approx 15 mins),
An Appreciation by John Milius, photo
montage, talent files for director David Lean and stars William Holden, Alec
Guinness, Jack Hawkins & Sessue Hayakawa, theatrical trailers (for
The Bridge on the River Kwai,
The Guns of Navarone,
Fail-Safe and Lawrence
of Arabia), animated film-themed menu screens with music & sound

Modern action movies are usually
noisy, superficial affairs, with flashy pyrotechnics, rapid-fire editing and
easy-to-understand characters. Of course, most modern action movies don't win
Academy Awards, either. Maybe the people behind these flicks could learn a thing
or two from David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai,
one of the best action movies of all time and winner of seven Oscars including
Best Picture. The secret to Lean's success is a mixture of stunning
cinematography (by Jack Hildyard), a perfect balance of expertly staged action
and suspense, and most importantly, a collection of extraordinarily vivid
characters. Kwai is one of those rare
movies in which every single character is as interesting and well thought-out as
the next. You could make a pretty good movie about any one of these guys. Bring
them together and you've got something akin to greatness.

The plot of Kwai is surprisingly simple.
A group of British soldiers under the command of Colonel Nicholson (Alec
Guinness in a brilliant, Oscar-winning performance) is brought to a Japanese
prison camp run by Colonel Saito (silent film star Sessue Hayakawa). Saito
commands the POWs to build a bridge linking a railway that will run through
Burma. Thus begins one of the movies' greatest battles of will, as Nicholson
insists on building "a proper bridge" and doing it strictly by the
wartime rules of conduct. Meanwhile, an American Navy man (William Holden), who
miraculously escaped from Saito's camp, is recruited by British Special Forces'
Major Warden (Jack Hawkins) to return to Kwai and destroy the bridge.

Without the burden of having to explain and justify numerous plot twists, Lean
and his cast are freed to explore these characters and situations to a degree
unseen in most action pictures. Certainly, one of the primary reasons to watch
Kwai is Alec Guinness. His performance no
doubt came as quite a shock to audiences in 1957, who were used to seeing him in
comedies like The Ladykillers and
The Lavender Hill Mob. As Nicholson,
Guinness displays a strength and sense of purpose bordering on mania. It is one
of the defining performances of Guinness' long and distinguished career. Equally
good are William Holden, Sessue Hayakawa and the eternally underrated Jack
Hawkins (who, like Guinness, would go on to appear in Lean's
Lawrence of Arabia). Lean stages the film
with an ever-mounting sense of tension that makes Kwai
feel considerably shorter than its two-and-a-half-hour-plus running time. By the
time we reach the climactic action sequence, the activity conveys an urgency
that has been earned and sustained by what's led up to it. This is not mere
gunplay and subterfuge for its own sake. Lean has made us understand exactly
what is at stake for all involved.

The first few minutes of this disc frankly made me very nervous. The opening
credits display a great deal of grain, dirt and scratches that would have made
this transfer wholly unacceptable if it had continued. Fortunately, the picture
improves almost immediately. Jack Hildyard's Cinemascope photography is
presented in an excellent anamorphic transfer, with only the most minor and
intermittent flaws. I detected a little bit of image instability in one or two
shots, but otherwise nothing major enough to distract. This is easily the best
presentation of this film I've ever seen. The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack remix
is slightly underwhelming, and occasionally is one of the few elements of the
package that reveal the film's age. But in the end, it does the job. You won't
really be missing too much if you stick to the 2.0 track.

Columbia TriStar has released two separate versions of Kwai,
a single movie-only disc and a limited edition two-disc set with a wealth of
extras. The highlight of the 2-disc set is a 53-minute Making
of documentary, that does an excellent job of tracing
Kwai's journey from Pierre Boulle's novel
to becoming an Oscar-winning classic. This documentary is hampered only by the
fact that virtually all of Kwai's major
players are no longer with us. Still, DVD producer Laurent Bouzereau does well
with the surviving members of the team, though the documentary does not deal
with the restoration of Kwai (as promised
on the back cover). Other bonuses include a vintage "making of"
featurette, called Rise and Fall of a Jungle Giant,
and a short film produced by the University of Southern California (introduced
by Holden) that looks like the kind of thing shown to Introduction to Film
classes during their first week of school. We also get an animated photo gallery
of posters (both domestic and international) and lobby cards accompanied by
Malcolm Arnold's score, the expected talent files and trailers, and a short "appreciation"
by filmmaker John Milius. Anyone who's seen the Apocalypse
Now documentary Hearts of Darkness
knows that Milius is a terrific interview subject, and he conveys a genuine love
and enthusiasm for Kwai in this segment.
As with the similar interview with Steven Spielberg on the Lawrence
of Arabia package however, I don't understand why the Milius
interview couldn't have been incorporated into the main documentary. Whenever
these things are featured as stand-alone segments, they end up repeating many of
the same clips from the film that were used in the documentary.

Disc One also features an isolated music score track, which is always a nice
feature to have, but in this case results in a lot of dead air. Malcolm Arnold's
score did win an Oscar, but it's a lot more conventional than Maurice Jarre's
score for Lawrence. The most memorable
piece of music from Kwai wasn't even
written for the movie - it's the World War I tune Colonel
Bogey's March. I encourage isolated music scores on DVDs in general,
but I don't think I'm going to be playing this one all that often. Rounding out
the package are a couple of nifty DVD-ROM features (including a trivia game and
a collection of maps and historical background) and a reproduction of the 1957
souvenir book (which amusingly gives producer Sam Spiegel the lion's share of
the credit for bringing Kwai together).

The Bridge on the River Kwai is one of the
best films of the 1950s, a decade that I happen to think produced some of the
greatest films ever made. With this and Lawrence of
Arabia, Columbia TriStar has produced DVD editions worthy of David
Lean's greatest achievements (it's also worth noting that Criterion has released
some of Lean's earlier works, including the Charles Dickens adaptations
Great Expectations and
Oliver Twist). Columbia TriStar deserves
praise and thanks for lavishing such care on these classic titles. Add to these
discs Warner's new release of Doctor Zhivago,
and Lean fans have a great deal to be happy about.